Nerding Day: Barbie MAD LIBS 🌭

MAD LIBS are already one of the saddest ways to VERB with human language. They are designed to let pedestrian minds manufacture NOUN by clumsily beating reason to death– like putting on a play about laughing at a badly translated FOREIGN FOOD menu. But with a little effort they can still be ADJECTIVE, right? MAD LIBS are like an AI generating CONCEPT INCLUDING PREGNANT HULK HOGAN PLAYING TENNIS. They won’t replace real art, but what’s the harm in letting chaos VERB your silly idea? I guess what I’m saying is you get out of them what you put into them. It’s not like the author of a MAD LIBS book could PERSONALLY FAIL, right? I guess we’ll VERB ENDING IN “ING” see.

A woman named Stacy Wasserman wrote this book decades later than you’d imagine, in 2021. Her only previous published work was Royal Family MAD LIBS, so Barbie MAD LIBS may have been her punishment for violating lèse-majesté laws. It is as uninspired as an intentionally unfinished book of Barbie quotes can be. It’s one of the lowest forms of art made worse by indifference and stupidity. Still, let’s try to have a(n) ADJECTIVE time!

While navigating Barbie MAD LIBS, we’ll be using the three pillars of auto-generated comedy– silliness, unexpected horror, and wanton lewdness. I call this The Pizza Dismember Penis Gambit, and I’ve designed a tool that allows me to randomize even the randomness of this groundbreaking MAD LIBbing system:

The book includes a full page explaining how to fill in blanks and another defining adjectives and nouns, which is pretty revealing about its intended audience. If something markets itself as a “word game” and the first thing it does is explain words, you’re either too good for it or a below average ape. So with that in mind, this fucking thing is for FUCK ENDING IN “ING” idiots, let’s read “TRUE FRIENDS” by Stacy Wasserman.

This sucks. No matter what noun or adjective you pick, this “World’s Greatest Word Game” won’t mean anything. Barbie’s friends might mean the CHEESEBURGER to her. Or the INTRUDER’S ERECTION. Or the FAILED AIDS CHARITY. It doesn’t matter. Part of the MAD LIBS fun, maybe the only kind of MAD LIBS fun, is trying to ruin its intended fun. Which isn’t actually fun when the coherence is this poorly guarded. Unless you put in exactly the words WORLD and SPECIAL, it’s PROBABLY NOT FUNNY gibberish. So fun-wise, this is a hail mary– a desperate prayer that the reader puts in a hilarious sex act or gets tickled by gently wrong syntax. This is the comedy equivalent of looking around the room and saying words. Fuckin do better, Stacy.

What the shit is Stacy doing here? Barbie’s friend Teresa VERBs with excitement, but the thing she gets excited for is very specifically “mold?” What the fuck kind of tactic is this? Are you trying to do the silly part of the MAD LIBS for us, Stacy? It was a nice save there at the end to let me choose the animal and what they do at night. Because giraffes? Going antiquing at night? Get. Out.

The first blank in Renee Chao’s backstory seems suspicious. You don’t throw the word “motor” in front of a random body part unless you mean for that to get dirty. Even Stacy Wasserman should have had the foresight to know “motor-PART OF THE BODY” was going to end in either a turbo sex hole or mild confusion. Like what, is Renee going to be a motor-elbow? A motor-tooth? Fucking stupid. Stacy, you made Barbie’s other friend an amateur mold historian. The least you could do here is clearly establish Renee has an internal combustion vagina. But I guess I have to do everything, so here: “she’s UNHAPPY a lot. Renee JACKHAMMER-FUCKS up any room she’s in.”

Daisy is Greek, so she will VERB anywhere. This one is great! It has a high potential to be funny, and now you know if you have any problematic biases against Greek culture.

Barbie’s last friend is Nikki, who can VERB anything. This swings hard away from meaningless incoherence. Most verbs you put here will simply make sense in a mundane way. Unless you’re deliberately throwing penises in her path, Stacy Wasserman is laying the groundwork for a eulogy. She has the comedy instincts of a gas leak. She made Nikki a/an ADJECTIVE entrepreneur! That’s scientifically the least silly place you can put a blank in that sentence. That’s like saying “Nikki’s grandmother watched her sick cat finally die on HOLIDAY*.” You can’t hope for a miracle on every single blank, Stacy.

* FORD MOTOR DAYS SALE.

Let’s try a different one. “BARBIE AND KEN’S FAVORITE RECIPE.”

This is more nonsense. Barbie and Ken VERB each other’s recipes? Aside from squirt and strangle, what verbs would work here? And look at the last two blanks. Does that say “SILLY WORD?” And EXCLAMATION!?” Are you telling me the other words weren’t supposed to be silly? What the goddamn fuck are we even doing here, Stacy? And then, after that, you want me to give you an exclamation to be placed all by itself and used as an exclamation!? That’s not MAD LIBS, Stacy. That’s not goddamn anything, Stacy. “DuRr, reADER, tHiNk of an eXPreSsioN yOUrseLF and ThEN sAy iT!” Get back to Hell, Stacy.

Oh, this will kill. “One and a half cups of COLOR sugar?” Holy shit, what if they pick green? Or mauve!? And oh my god, “NUMBER teaspoons cinnamon?” Any number!? Can you imagine if they picked the funny one! If the military developed a PSYOP to destroy an individual’s sense of humor, it would look identical to the Barbie MAD LIBS manuscript. There’s a good chance they’d give it that code name too, and wait, hold on, I may have solved the mystery of Barbie MAD LIBS.

So Stacy finishes her SARCASTIC WORD comedy recipe by telling you to bake the cookies for NUMBER minutes. Really, Stacy? NUMBER again? In your wildest dumbshit dreams, is there a funny number of minutes to bake cookies, Stacy? Are you hoping someone cheats and puts in BONER SEVEN? Because that’s what I did. And I still hate it. Serve that with whipped INNOCENCE and enjoy!

Let’s do another! “SELF-CARE DAY!”

Stacy might have completely lost her mind. She’s having us insert a random LETTER OF THE ALPHABET into acronyms. Stacy, where you’re from, are there alphabet letters that are hilarious on their own? Ha ha, W, maybe? Are you hoping some random letter will be so evocative of a word that the reader’s brain inserts it into D-I-BLANK to create a joke? Are they going to see an S, somehow think “sex with stepfather,” and continue on this long train of thought to decode the acronym “do-it-sex-with-stepfather” in their head? That’s bad therapy, not bad comedy. Stop giving us your weird shit to unpack, Stacy.

But seriously, ADJECTIVE work with the last sentence here, Stacy. “Take NOUN!” No matter what you plug in, how could that be anything other than a limp drive off a cliff? What noun were you imagining your readers would take? Soup? Abortion? Anal, for example? The best -the best- case scenario here is that you have beloved pop culture icon, Barbie, screaming “Take titty!” Honestly, it isn’t a bad catchphrase.

I made a butthole mask out of ritually murdered yogurt and edible panties juice, which means Stacy has finally constructed a proper MAD LIBS sentence. Unfortunately, she simply cannot resist letting her readers fill in a hilarious blank NUMBER. Oh, do I rub tragic wet yogurt on my asshole for 11 minutes, Stacy? Terrific. That really puts a button on the gag. And good luck finding a punchline where you “VERB with cold water.” Juggle? Ejaculate? Interrogate? Never mind, those are all very silly. Nearly competent job, Stacy.

Combine half a cup of sea Nazi with four tablespoons of vomiting olive oil and two teaspoons of breast milk zest? Stacy seems to be getting better, because this is easy-to-steer madness. She can never quite land it, though. She ends this chain of potentially fun nonsense with “scrub ADVERB?” In what magical universe of possibilities are there silly ways to scrub, you stupid CAREFULLY NON-GENDERED INSULT?

Let’s do one more. “BARBIE’S GUIDE TO VLOGGING!”

Barbie is an internet PIZZA! A MISSING vlogger with over BONER SEVEN subscribers! This one is off to a good start. Even Stacy’s deranged need to include a blank NUMBER on every page sort of works here, because it’d be sort of strange if Barbie only had, for instance, BONER SEVEN subscribers. And I like how the final blank has the potential to disrupt the entire narrative. Barbie could give her personal tips for successful KIDNAPPING, or ABRUPTLY STOPPING.

There aren’t a huge number of verbs that can sensibly BLANK an audience. But all the big ones are there. Fuck. Mutate. Waterboard. A skilled MAD LIBber could make this work.

Jesus Christ, this went off the rails. SOMETHING ALIVE (PLURAL)? What the fuck, Stacy? Why do they need to be alive? Are you worried if Barbie interviewed UNIDENTIFIED REMAINS or OLD DIAPERS it would disrupt the tight fiction you’ve put together? Let her talk to a stapler or a ghost; it’s MAD LIBS. And nice job on “PART OF THE BODY (PLURAL)-up.” The purest soul in the world would instantly and confidently write “balls” for this, and only find out later an interview with their uncle is going to get “lots of balls-up.” Gross, Stacy.

And for the record, Stacy, adding the word “furry” to the front of yet another random NUMBER probably isn’t the secret code to unlocking its hilarity. Here, I’ll show you: furry 9/11.

By this point of the book I had lost my temper and I was filling in “fuck” for every blank. I knew it was going to cheer me up, but I could have never expected the magic of “Consider FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’” That’s a world-class catchphrase for any occasion. Imagine a newscaster signing off by saying, “FUCK-off like ‘FUCK YOU!’ ZOINKS! Keep FUCKING!” You would VERB ENDING IN “ING” shit. So on behalf of everyone here at 1-900-🌭, we thank you for your continued support, and FUCK-off like “FUCK YOU!”

…

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme, Chance McDermott, who is the USURPING-est example of BRATWURST we have ever BUTT.